On an Apparent Limit to Verb Idiosyncrasy, Given a Mapping between Argument Realization and Polysemy (or Argument Optionality)

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Abstract

Full-scale natural language processing systems require lots of
information on thousands of words. This is especially true for systems
handling the meanings of words and phrases, and it seems especially
true for the verbs of a language: at first glance at least, and when
viewed as if they were argument-taking functions, verbs seem to have
highly individual requirements---along at least two dimensions. 1)
They vary in the range of arguments they take (further complicated by
polysemy, i.e. the proliferation of their senses). And to a
significant extent 2) they vary in the way in which those arguments
are realized in syntax. Since arbitrary information must be stored
anyway---such as the particular concept pairing with the sound and/or
spelling of a word---it seems reasonable to expect to store other
potentially idiosyncratic information, including what might be needed
for polysemy and argument realization. But once the meanings of words
are stored, it isn't completely clear how much else really needs to be
stored, in principle. With a significant degree of patterning in
polysemy, and in argument realization, real speakers extrapolate from
known senses and realizations. To fully model the processing of
natural language, there must be at least some automatic production,
and/or verification, of polysemy and argument realization, from the
semantics.
Since there are two phenomena here (polysemy and argument
realization), the interaction between them could be crucial; and
indeed particular instances of this interaction appear again and again
in theoretical studies of syntax and meaning. Yet the real extent of
the interaction has not itself been properly investigated. To do so,
we supply, for the argument-taking configurations of 3000 English
verbs, the typical kind of semantic specification---on the roles of
their arguments---but do a kind of high-level analysis of the
resulting patterns. The results suggest a rule of co-occurrences:
divergences in argument realization are in fact rigorously accompanied
by divergences in polysemy or argument optionality. We argue that this
implies the existence of highly productive mechanisms for polysemy and
argument realization, thus setting some crucial groundwork for their
eventual production by automated means.